You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.

I am free to write the worst junk in the world.

[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind...The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mann ered, congenial.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.